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To open this brief review, I’ll start with a money quote:
The Horn by Renato Meucci and Gabriele Rocchetti is the most significant book on horn history published in the last 50 years. Highly recommended! John Ericson, Horn Matters
A new book on horn history?
The Horn was published in late 2023 as part of the Yale Musical Instrument series. This really is the most significant publication on horn history since Reginald Morley-Pegge, The French Horn, 2nd ed. (London: Ernest Benn Ltd., 1973). It has been 50 years! Here is another money quote:
If you are interested at all in horn history you need this book, and it is a must for every collegiate music library. John Ericson, Horn Matters
It is very easy to obtain as well, I purchased my copy from Amazon.
Personal aside: I’m interested in horn history
By the time I was a Doctoral student I was very interested in horn history, and I took a deep dive into all the available resources when I was writing my dissertation (which had the weighty title The Development of Valved Horn Technique in Early Nineteenth-Century Germany: A Survey of Performers and Works Before 1850 With Respect to the use of Crooks, Right-Hand Technique, Transposition, and Valves) and subsequent articles that were published in The Horn Call and the Historic Brass Society Journal.
As part of that personal deep dive I soon realized that a percentage of what various resources contained was based on repeating what other sources had previously said — facts that could and should be revisited.
For a specific example, something I was very excited about in my early publications was I had shown clearly that Auf dem Strom (1828) was not the first work for the valved horn by a major composer (which is what Morley-Pegge had said). Actually, Schubert had previously called for the valved horn in an 1827 work for four horns and men’s chorus, Nachtgesang im Walde. Plus, Auf dem Strom is very playable on natural horn, valves were not necessary in the way they were on the 1827 work. I outlined this all in an article published in The Horn Call Annual 8 (1996) — a version of that is online (here).
I was very glad to see that Meucci and Rocchetti are of the same thinking as I am on the topic of Schubert — and really pretty much every other topic related to areas that I had studied very closely. I don’t know every history topic as well, but it gives me a great feeling for the quality of the overall book, which truly has a lot of ground to cover.
I was also excited to see that I was quoted, cited (in the footnotes, bibliography, and online supplement), and thanked in the acknowledgements. This is a wonderful outcome to see from years of working on topics related to the history of the valved horn in the 19th century.
Setting the record straight
Another important element of this book is that the authors are not afraid at all to set the record straight in relation to misstatements and misunderstandings in older publications. This is so important, as there really are many more sources and resources to consider than existed 50 years ago, and many topics in older publications sorely needed to be revisited in light of recent research.
John meets Renato
One other small aside, I met one of the authors some 25 years ago at an Historic Brass Society event in Paris (I presented on Gumpert), and we even shared a meal there. He was already at work on the book then, which says a lot about how long it takes to write the really serious deep dive book on horn history. I recall that he mentioned he was focusing on citing resources in refereed journals (such as the Historic Brass Society Journal), and he has followed through on that, you won’t see as many references to The Horn Call as the reader in the United States might expect. While this probably limited the number of citations to my own publications, I think this still was a good move, the book is very scholarly but, at the same time, it reads easily and has plenty of footnotes (the best part! I love footnotes).
A minor criticism
In the book you will periodically see text that points you toward supplemental online materials. There is great information to be found in those materials, but it is information that was clearly deemed beyond what they had space to include in the print version.
My understanding is that if you use the Kindle version you will find live links to those materials, but if you are reading in print you need to go to this page:
https://yalebooks.co.uk/book/9780300118933/the-horn/
Scroll down and find the “Appendices & Notes” tab, and that will open up a 238 page, book format online supplement (that is best viewed full screen on a computer). While presently this works great (you could even go read the supplement right now from that link, without buying the book), I worry about the reader that wants to find these same materials thirty years from now. Will they still be online and accessible on whatever type(s) of devices people are using then? Hopefully the publishers will find a way to maintain these important supplemental materials for the future reader.
I’ll be back
To close, this semester I’m teaching my horn repertoire course at Arizona State, and I’ll be reading The Horn very closely as we work our way forward. Early summer I’ll hope to post a supplement to this review, after reflecting on all the materials further.
